


Peat Smoke Rising

by feroxargentea



Category: The Eagle of the Ninth - Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle | The Eagle of the Ninth - All Media Types
Genre: Hiking, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Missing Scene, Sharing Body Heat, Wilderness, book canon, canonically ambiguous relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2017-07-11
Packaged: 2018-11-02 20:49:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10952481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: Peat smoke rising. Two worlds entwined.





	Peat Smoke Rising

**Author's Note:**

  * For [luckydip](https://archiveofourown.org/users/luckydip/gifts).



> Written for the Not Prime Time challenge, for luckydip, who requested "something about Esca". Set between chapters 19 and 20 of book-canon, on the way home from the Wall.
> 
> Thank you to cj2017, alcyone301 and alltoseek for beta.

* * *

 

Esca swore softly as his boot caught on a twisted heather-stem, sending him tumbling to his knees.

“Lugh’s spear!” he muttered, getting to his feet and brushing the streaks of peat from his tunic. “If there was little enough of a trail to follow in the valley, there is none at all now.”

Marcus caught up with him and halted by his side, breathing hard. “How about here, brother?” he asked, looking at the moorlands rising high and featureless around them. “Might we rest here?”

Esca shook his head. “No, not here. A little farther.”

He hauled at the lead-rope of his pony, who was beginning to stumble and balk at the boggy soil. Marcus too was foundering fast, though he would never admit to it. His old wound had been troubling him since well before they left the Wall, and they had had a long march that day—too long, perhaps, for a man whose leg had never truly mended and who had spent the best of his strength in saving the gilded Eagle he now carried in a linen-wrapped bundle at his breast.

They had started that morning soon after cockcrow, heading south as far as the rolling plains would take them, and then, when the hills closed fast around them and barred their passage, veering east to climb a steep packhorse trail, watched over by the burial mounds of the Old People looming on either side of the pass. A mournful wind was bowing the cotton-grass now, whistling around the gritstone boulders and tugging at the straps of the ponies’ packs. This would not be a wise place to stop in any season, Esca knew, and especially not this close to Samhain, when the spirits of warriors who had long since passed West of the Sunset might walk abroad again, envious of the living. He shivered and pulled his cloak closer around him.

“Just a little farther,” he said again. “See, the summit ahead? Beyond it we should find better shelter than here.”

He flexed his shoulder, trying to shake out the deep ache that came from supporting Marcus over miles of rough ground. Marcus had been dragging his right leg more and more since their desperate flight from the northern tribesmen, and for some days now he had been unable to trust his full weight on it during the more precipitous descents, as well as needing Esca’s help to haul himself up steep slopes. Now he rested his hand on Esca’s shoulder again and trudged doggedly onwards, heading for the highest point of the ridge, where the summit was encircled by the remains of an ancient hill fort.

They did at least have ponies to carry their packs and to ride where the ground was less treacherous, and for that Esca was grateful, though it was the army of occupation he had to thank. They had been lent fresh mounts the previous day at the garrison fort of Ardotalia: good sturdy post-horses sent from the great Roman camp at Deva. The Master of Horse at Ardotalia stables boasted that his charges were reared in the horse runs that lay in the shadow of Yr Wyddfa itself, and though all horse-breeders lied fluently from the cradle upwards, it might have been true. At any rate they reminded Esca of the shaggy-haired ponies of his youth, small but surefooted as they strode head-down across the moors. Not as beautiful as the proud, arch-necked horses of the south, perhaps, but of far greater worth in the mist-wreathed uplands to which they were born.

Without their travel permit, it was unlikely he and Marcus would have been given any mounts at all. All the way from the Wall they had been met with suspicion, and the First Cohort of Frisiavonians at Ardotalia had been no different: surly sentries at the Praetorian gate scowling at their greasy tunics and mud-spattered leggings, ready to deny them entry; and then grudging acceptance which brightened into comradeship when the Cohort’s first centurion spotted the raven brand of Mithras on Marcus’ forehead. Marcus had been in his element then, back amongst his beloved Red Crests, the greatest and most powerful brotherhood ever known to the world of men, though Esca had lain cold and ill at ease all night in his narrow cot in the sleeping-cell next door.

He glanced up now, realising that the shrieking of the wind had dropped a little as they reached the first of the hill fort’s defensive ditches. Marcus pulled to a stop beside him.

“How about here?” he said. “I am hungry, Esca, if you are not, and I think we have not much daylight left to us.”

Esca looked around at the ancient ramparts of the Old People, ringing the hillside in great earthen waves. At least a dozen days had passed since the equinox, by his reckoning, and this late in the afternoon there was twilight already gathering in the hollows. Here amongst the furze in the fort’s lowest ditch, he and Marcus would have as much shelter as could be found anywhere in these parts, and they might even light a fire, for the embankment would shield its flames from anyone in the valley below. A fire would mean hot food and protection from wolves, and it would also mean warmth to soothe Marcus’ aching leg.

“Very well,” he said, smiling at the answering flash of teeth in Marcus’ dark face. “Let this be the place.”

 

* * *

 

Esca broke another piece from the dead hawthorn branch and thrust it into the white-hot embers, banking it with a slab of dry peat cut from beneath the furze, so that it might smoulder until morning. He swallowed the last bite of his supper—a mountain hare brought down with a lucky slingshot on the high moor—and leaned back on his saddle pack, listening to the hobbled ponies cropping at the fine turf of the rampart. The bags of wheat flour and raisins and smoked venison supplied by the Quartermaster at Ardotalia made a solid, comforting wedge at his back, a promise of sustenance for days to come, should the hunting grow scarce.

He glanced over at Marcus, who was watching the last of the westering sun and rubbing idly at his leg.

“It troubles you tonight,” Esca observed lightly.

Marcus flung his gnawed hare-bone into the fire. “No, not so much.”

“You were ever a poor liar, M-Marcus. Here, let me stretch out the muscles for you before they grow stiff, or they will be worse in the morning.”

He kneaded Marcus’ thigh gently through the woollen leggings, smoothing the twisted flesh, trying to soften the scar tissue over the old wound. He was aware that he had stumbled yet again over Marcus’ name, his tongue shaping itself to say “my Master” as of old, though Marcus had not appeared to notice. Like many of his people, he did not seem a man given much to introspection, nor to suspecting it in others, and he called Esca “brother” or “my Esca” in the Roman fashion without the least hesitation.

“Do you know what is strange about your language, M-Marcus?” Esca said. “It has but one word for brother.”

Marcus flexed his knee and looked up at him with his open, ready smile. “Why, how many words do you have, O child of the Brigantes?”

Esca extended three fingers and tapped the first. “Hearth-brothers, for one. The true sons of my parents. I am the second of three, and the only one yet living.”

“Ah. Yes, I remember you told me. I am sorry for it, Esca.”

Esca shrugged, uneasy as ever in the face of apology from one whom he loved so fiercely and who stood as a symbol of all he should hate. “It is as the gods shaped it. My hearth-brothers fought truly and died warrior deaths, and it was neither you nor your Cohort who slew them.” He tapped another finger to forestall any reply. “Then there were my brethren of the outer dwellings, said to have been sired by my father. I shall not impugn their mothers’ honour by suggesting they were not.”

Marcus shot him a grin, his teeth gleaming pale in the firelight. “Then I shall not either. As for me, I had no siblings that I know of, legitimate or otherwise. My legion was my family, and would have been the family of any brothers I possessed. My aunt and her husband, with whom I passed eight years in Rome, had no children either, though there were a couple of brats always underfoot, Marcellus and Quintus, the sons of the kitchen girl.”

“You grew up with them?”

“In a way, yes, but they were only slaves. In any case, before I reached manhood they had been given their manumission along with their mother, with enough money to set them up in a wineshop. I remember yet my aunt’s anger, how she scolded my uncle.”

“Anger at what?” Esca asked. “Oh...oh, they were his sons, so?”

“Probably, though not acknowledged as such,” Marcus said, matter-of-factly. “Why should they have been? They were not citizens and never could be.” He wiped his hands on the heather and stretched out on his bed of whinberry foliage, wrapping himself in his ragged cloak. “No, it was the cost at which my aunt grumbled, both of buying the wineshop and of freeing two children just at the age when they would have become worth their keep.” He held out the edge of the cloak. “Come, Esca, lie down, will you not? I shall keep the first watch, but you must lie with me, or I think we shall both freeze in this accursed wind.”

Esca knelt down on the springy foliage and folded himself into the cloak, pressing close to the warmth of Marcus’ back, so that the tips of Marcus’ peat-black hair prickled his nose. Marcus had had it cropped Roman-style again by the local cohort’s barber at the Wall, and he had called cheerfully on Esca to do likewise, forgetting for a moment that that would reveal the clipped ear marking his ex-slave as mere property. Perhaps the matter had never occurred to him at all. Certainly Esca had always tried to hide his disquiet at their planned return to Calleva, where he had spent most of his servitude. A freedman’s misgivings could hardly be of much weight alongside the return of the Eagle to its rightful keepers, and it was not as if slavery were unknown amongst the British tribes. The Brigantes, too, had had their forced labourers, familiar from Esca’s childhood. Yet that seemed an entirely different matter—different, perhaps, because his people had always known they might be taken in battle themselves, their children seized, their womenfolk carried off as field-slaves and concubines. How could Marcus, coming from a race who were always the masters, never the conquered, know what freedom meant to a Briton? How, when he clung still to the foolish supposition that a born slave was a contented slave, could he understand what was in Esca’s heart?

Even Esca himself had not fully grasped, as he burnished his father’s heron-tufted war spear and practiced wheeling his chariot, what awaited the fair-haired children of the neighbouring tribes when his people sent them south to the Roman slave-traders. When first he had been taken south himself, marched on a lead-rope behind a mule cart with his wrists tightly bound, he had been a gangly stripling not long joined to the Men’s Side, and he had learned the hard way that there were Romans in Britain aplenty who thought it a fine thing to have a russet-haired native lad to warm their beds, his pale skin patterned blue with warrior tattoos, strange and exotic still to those foreign-born overlords. But though he had not yet grown to his full strength, he had made his vows at the Night of New Spears, and he could not submit easily to such treatment. His first owner kept him only five or six moons before telling the ringmaster of Calleva’s amphitheatre, “Make a gladiator of the boy if you can, for he will never make a body slave! Watch him, for he is untameable—nothing but a wolf whelp!”

Esca might have told him that the way to tame a wolf cub was through kindness, not beatings, had the man thought to ask. Instead Esca had been sold to the Master of Combat, and given weapons—strange, cumbersome weapons, nothing like the balanced spear and longbow of his childhood—and taught to fight in the arena for the public’s amusement. To fight, and to lose, for most such contests were rigged. It was in the amphitheatre as it was in the rest of the world: the Romans did not pay to watch their own men fail.

And then finally, after the fight with the retiarius in which Esca should have died, came his last master: the one who had paid fifteen hundred sesterces for him and accepted the wolf cub he brought and helped him tame it. The one who had tried to learn his language and given him his own weapons back and asked nothing of him but what he chose freely to give.

Beside him, Marcus stirred and cleared his throat; Esca had thought him asleep, but it seemed he lay wakeful. He half-turned his head, the silhouette of his face just visible against the stars.

“You did not finish your list, Esca,” he said. “You told me your people’s tongue had three words for brother, did you not?”

“I did. The third is sword-brother, the one who fights beside me, defending my weak side with spear and buckler, and to whom I entrust my life.” Esca paused. “I have yet such a brother, I think.”

Marcus tucked himself more tightly against him and pulled the cloak up so that it was shielding both of them from the raw, blustering wind.

“Always, my Esca. Go to sleep now. I shall wake you when it is time for your watch.”

 

* * *

 

Esca crept from the warmth of Marcus’ arms a little before dawn, to rekindle the fire with dry stems of heather in its embers. It flared easily, its peat-scented smoke spiralling up on the breeze. Taking a handful of cotton-grass, he wiped the ashes from a flat stone, laid a couple of oatcakes on it and set it by the flames. Then he sat back on his haunches, humming softly to himself as he waited for the cakes to harden and brown.

A bird hopped up through the hawthorn, setting the gnarled branches swaying, and he watched it for a minute as it hesitated on the uppermost twig. A mistle thrush, or a redwing, perhaps? In the half-light he could not tell, until it raised its beak and poured forth its song: a cock blackbird, greeting the promise of the new day.

In the hollow of the ditch, Marcus was still curled in his cloak, his face half-covered, but above the rampart the eastern sky was already flushed with day-spring. Here on the ridge’s sunward slope, the morning air was heavy with the honeyed scent of furze blossom, marking the end of the dark northern uplands and the start of the low, rolling, limestone country that would lead them back to the Roman heartlands. Their route from the Wall had taken them a little wide of their true path, avoiding rumoured tribal unrest, but the garrison commander at Ardotalia had assured them the way would be clear now to Calleva. Calleva, where Marcus would be as much at home as he could be, this far from the Etruscan hills of which he spoke with so much affection, although in truth his nostalgic tales reminded Esca of everything he disliked about the south of Britain: the dust, the flies, the cowed populace, and the alien architecture cut four-square from a defeated landscape, its pale stone walls harsh in the unrelenting sun, so unlike the soft, damp light and ever-changing skies of home.

He glanced again at Marcus, who was sleeping with the Eagle cradled in the crook of his arm, that precious symbol for which he had risked so much and which would surely cause him more pain to come, for it was probable that Rome would refuse to acknowledge it. It was an ill-fated thing, the badge of a rebellious legion which the Senate had thought best forgotten. Retrieving it, though, and proving to himself beyond doubt his own courage and his father’s loyalty, had made Marcus whole as nothing else could have done. It was true that his leg would never mend and he would never be a legionary again, never stamp and wheel in the parade ground, straight and sound and proud, nor march the regulation twenty miles with his armour and impedimenta, but bringing the Eagle back to his people had healed the festering wound made in him by its loss, and if that was all Esca could give him, he was grateful to have been able to give that much.

Marcus stirred from his sleep and yawned wide, his jaw cracking. He uncurled himself slowly from his cloak, wincing as he tried to straighten his leg. Then, seeming all at once to realise where he was, he sat up and stared around wildly until he spotted Esca perched up on the rampart. He stumbled to his feet and climbed the slope to crouch next to him, looking out at the dark bowl of the valley.

Esca pointed to a line of willows marking a river meandering towards the lowlands. “That is where we are heading today, I suppose.”

“So the garrison commander advised me,” Marcus said, “although he could not tell what the valley was called.”

“It is a beautiful place, to have no name.”

Marcus wrapped an arm around Esca’s shoulders, pulling him close, sparking off the hot, familiar ache in his bruised muscles. “Perhaps you should name it yourself, wolf-cub of mine.”

In the eastern sky, bright rays of dawn were reaching across the valley, lighting a path southwards to Calleva and to the future.

“Hope, then,” Esca said, standing up and helping Marcus to his feet. “Let us simply call it Hope. Come, my brother, lean on me. It is not so very far now that we have to go.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

>  **Modern place names:** The Roman fort of Ardotalia is Melandra Castle, in northwest Derbyshire. Deva is Chester. Yr Wyddfa is Snowdon. The packhorse route goes via Edale Cross, with Bronze Age burial mounds at Kinderlow End and Rushup Edge. The Iron Age hill fort is Mam Tor, above Castleton, and if you climb up there before dawn you can watch the sun rise over a valley that’s still called Hope. 


End file.
